Are you now, or have you ever been, a journalist?

[chat_noir]

This great quote is from a review of "Good Night, and Good Luck"

That's what Good Night, and Good Luck. feels like, a smooth, sardonic smack in the face of today's so-called newspeople, the cinematic equivalent of a withering glare and a disdainful roll of the eyes. Oh, this is an angry movie, calm and collected on the surface and seethed with reeled-in rage underneath. Yeah, it's about Edward R. Murrow and how he took on McCarthy's insanity, but what it's really about is how we need a Murrow now and is there no one, not one supposed journalist, with the balls to take up Murrow's mantle of integrity and honesty and fearlessness?

(Yes, as a matter of fact there is a period at the end of the film's title. And you know what? This flick is so damn perfect that I've got no problem forgiving that kind of nonsense.)

What's brilliant about Good Night isn't that it ends up sorta serving the very purpose it's angry that no one else is serving, or that it agrees with my own politics, but that it's so damn cool. For all its anger, there's no ranting and raving, no speechifying, no histrionics or grandiose dramatics. It's like, Look, this is what really happened, and the facts don't need any embellishments or frills to highlight how damn relevant they are to what's going on today. The only overt commentary comes in the bits that bookend the film, in which Murrow, in a speech to a 1958 gathering of network execs, condemns the deplorable state of TV and wonders how America 50 years later will look back at the time, as to suggest that things would be so much better in the futuristic 21st century and they all should be ashamed of themselves in the unenlightened 1950s. That's the film's cool, sardonic humor: the irony in the idea that our TV today should be smarter and more sophisticated, when of course the only thing we've done "better" is expand the depths of inanity to which mass entertainment can descend.

http://www.flickfilosopher.com/flickfilos/archive/2005/goodnightgoodluck.shtml

[Rhiannon12866]

1. Good review, thank you!

Actually, I thought you actually asking the question, so I was prepared with my answer, LOL! But this is far more interesting...:hi: